Field of Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to a semiconductor device having air-gap spacer regions, and including a contact region having one or more discontinuities to accommodate for manufacturing variations and/or misalignment tolerances present within a semiconductor fabrication process.
Related Art
The continued improvement of semiconductor fabrication processes has allowed manufacturers and designers to create a smaller and a more powerful electronic device. The semiconductor fabrication process has progressed from a 10 μm semiconductor fabrication process that was reached around 1971 to a 22 nm semiconductor fabrication process that was reached around 2012. The semiconductor fabrication process is expected to further progress onto a 5 nm semiconductor fabrication process around 2019. With each progression of the semiconductor fabrication process, components of the integrated circuits have become smaller to allow more components to be fabricated onto the semiconductor substrate. However, with each progression of the semiconductor fabrication process, new challenges in creating integrated circuits have been uncovered.
The manufacturers and designers are presently manufacturing and designing integrated circuits with self-aligned components, such as self-aligned gates (SAG) and self-aligned contacts (SAC) to provide some examples. The positioning of these self-aligned components is determined through patterning of various dielectric regions within the integrated circuits. However, one challenge in creating self-aligned components with each progression of the semiconductor fabrication process relates to manufacturing variations and/or misalignment tolerances present within the semiconductor fabrication process. These manufacturing variations and/or misalignment tolerances can cause these self-aligned components to be displaced from their intended position in the integrated circuits which can lead to catastrophic failure of the integrated circuits.
The disclosure will now be described with reference to the accompanying drawings. In the drawings, like reference numbers generally indicate identical, functionally similar, and/or structurally similar elements. The drawing in which an element first appears is indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the reference number.